Foreword

Content has never been more important. Content drives transactions, websites, and engagement. Content is the container of information that makes data consumable, usable, and actionable and has become the lifeblood of many businesses and business processes. Financial service, media, government, and high-technology organizations wouldn’t exist without electronic documents and other forms of content. Today the Enterprise Content Management industry is worth $5 billion in software alone, according to analyst group IDC. Businesses dealing with the overload of information and the need to keep that information timely and accurate are willing to pay a lot to get content under control.

However, in the three decades since the introduction of content management, the number of content systems has proliferated, with many similar systems sitting side by side. Internal IT organizations and system integrators are frequently reinventing the wheel as the CIO struggles to meet the information needs of the enterprise. Over the last two decades, this has led enterprises large and small to spend over $50 billion on software, hardware, and services to deliver content solutions to end users. Solutions such as invoice capture, contract management, regulatory submissions, and responsive websites, among many, many other solutions, can take months and even years to go into effective production.